Let's talk about farming

RoA succeeded at making PvE a solo activity. With scaling practically nonfunctional (capping at +1 mob on the 2nd wave) or outright disabled (golems, etc.), RoA PvE is completely non-viable to do as a GROUP or DUO, the loot is in all cases barely enough for one person. We checked a lot of mob spawns the past week and 90% are garbage in terms reward from a group PvE point of view.

I am told that before I started playing, mob scaling worked better. It seems I missed the boat on this, as right now it is a tedious anti-social activity, and I am struggling to motivate myself to deal with it, as I have been killing these same mobs since 2009, and the bolt spamming on damage sponges gets old.

Beyond that, as I mentioned before in my feedback thread and RoA discord: Selentine-tier materials are bottlenecked by a too low influx from PvE sources. For an entry-level material, it takes too much time to obtain it, and it cannot be group farmed. Insult to injury is people whom severely out-gear such spawns and not actually need those mats, are actively camping these spawns just to kill people farming there. These spawns (including Behemoths, Ancients, and Sages) need to be improved to support small groups up to 3 people. Or at the very least, these mobs should just drop more selentine-tier materials to reduce the AFK time needed to deal with respawn times to make a gearbag.

Speaking of camping: Alt scouts, likely due to freemium, are a New Dawn-level plague. Freemium accounts need an auto-kick that disconnects them after ~20 minutes of inactivity. It won't completely solve it, but it will make it tedious enough that more people will stop using scouting alts.

Edit: The other issue with the over-camping, borderline new player griefing occurring at selentine-tier spawns, has to do with the fact that these spawns are too centralized, and easy to camp or get to in a short amount of time. This camping can be seen as a blockade to the material influx as well since it is preventing a lot of these spawns from actually being farmed. The middle should be a focus point for high level PvE, not new player mobs.

While that is all true, I really did not enjoy killing people with really bad characters or even fighting them, in dfo they could barely hurt a strong character. Once I was finally quite strong character wise I started winning a lot of fights really easily, it was no challenge in most cases, even 1v2 or 1v3 or 3v15, 2v8, etc. Character power mattered to an extreme degree, while in RoA it's a more even playing field, for better or worse.

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Well you can have an even playing field with no players because nobody can be bothered to log into a game where no one leaves their banks because there is nothing to do, or you can have an uneven but populated playing field because everyone is out grinding to gain an advantage.

If no advantage can be gained by putting in more time and effort no one is going to put in any time/effort.

It really comes down to whether you want an MMO or a fighting game, you cant please everyone and in trying to do so youll end up pleasing no one.

Like right now no one is pleased, the people who just want to play a fighting game arent happy because there is no arena for them to queue and as such its very difficult and slow for them to find any fights, and the people who wanted to play an MMO arent happy because theyre bored because they have nothing to work towards.

Staff MemberBPG RepresentativeLifetime

1. it feels really bad to wait seven minutes and loot two selentine
2. cooldown should be two minutes if it's going to stay at two to five materials
3. the loot is bland, not a whole lot going on
4. rare drops are far too rare, you'd be lucky to get anything
5. I like fighting them and controlling
6. minor hotspots

Regarding group non-boss pvp, there are some good spots but most people don't know they exist because it takes a lot of searching, and it probably shouldn't, super spawns should be visible on the map and more abundant. There is a massive beastman spawn in northern elf lands, for example.You can solo it but it's more efficient with two peoople or even three if we're talking about non-maxed/vets.

@GoodDoggie I do think some form of grinding should be introduced. One example would be rare skill books dropped in pve that give really small but nice bonuses like +0.1 archery damage, can use a max of 30 archery books.There could be books for each protection, damage type, etc. Good pve and village loot imo.

Benefactor

Solo farming should be more rewarding on the whole, since it is a lot riskier, both due to farming at lower hp, and not having backup when you get jumped, and higher chance at being outnumbered.

But there should totally be group PvE hotspots. Make 1-2 small dungeons have infinite, or at least brutal scaling, each spawn you clear gives +1 mob, up to like +10, with very small downtime. Bam, fantastic PvE spot and a hotspot for small scale groups.

As for progression, make titles/tasks give PvE bonuses. Instant near infinite progression, at no change to pvp.

I still stand by what I said, and I never said I was good, average or otherwise. Way to take a completely true statement, and rather than try and prove it wrong say I am "the worst". What exactly am I the worst at, and what does that have to do with the statement I made that is 100 percent factual.

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Your statement was completely false.

You claimed a good player is capable of winning 1v10s against geared average players.

I dont know if you do hard drugs and as a result are completely out of touch with reality but everyone knows your claim is nonsense.

Maybe you just dont quite know what "average" means.

In any case it is abundantly clear your brain is mangled, I don't care to speculate whether its been that way since birth or if its a self-inflicted injury, but as a result of it I dont think replying to you any further is productive, and so I wont.--- Post updated ---

1mil and tell me in advance which 20 pinger with more hours in the last month than I've put into the game since 09 youll have hopping on your char so I know what to title the clip when they end up in my pvp vid.

LoyalLegend

You claimed a good player is capable of winning 1v10s against geared average players.

I dont know if you do hard drugs and as a result are completely out of touch with reality but everyone knows your claim is nonsense.

Maybe you just dont quite know what "average" means.

In any case it is abundantly clear your brain is mangled, I don't care to speculate whether its been that way since birth or if its a self-inflicted injury, but as a result of it I dont think replying to you any further is productive, and so I wont.--- Post updated ---

1mil and tell me in advance which 20 pinger with more hours in the last month than I've put into the game since 09 youll have hopping on your char so I know what to title the clip when they end up in my pvp vid.

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Maybe thats how wagers work in your world. I would fight on my own but not for 1 mil, maybe 50k or something reasonable. That is probably too small of an amount for you considering you know in the back of your mind I have a pretty good shot at at least making you look bad, if not beating you at least one fight out of 3.

Legend

Overall, I love farming in RoA but there are some very serious issues that need to be addressed and discussed. I really want to see what you guys think, let's see if we can promote some positive change because I know a lot of you hate farming and those of us that enjoy it often have criticisms as well.

Rare loot is far too rare to the point of it not being fun. I keep track of everything I farm and have hundreds of screenshots from hour-long farming sessions, nearly all pictures have roughly the same loot for each monster. Loot is extremely predictable. Maps should be MUCH more common, as should keys.

Key loot needs a bump in rare ore if your going to add more or no one will bother ever turning them in and they will become a second currency. Map fragments should be way more common, and need to be removed from Boss level mobs. (Still think Toy Drops are stupidly high to the point on not giving a shit about them)

Big monsters are less profitable than small and medium monsters in most cases. Sure, the loot is generally good but the respawn timers are huge. If you actually calculate gold per hour these monsters are often very poor options for wealth building. This does not include champions and other boss monsters.

This is because bigger monsters tend to require more people and the loot is designed for 1 person, repeatable tasks need to be added to every big spawn if you want it to be profitable for everyone. Loot scaling system would also solve this problem. Monsters like he Kraken should be dropping between 10-15k plus rares since your basically risking 100k in supplies just to attempt to kill it, should also remove some of the Kraken spawns its kind of stupid to have like 20.

Rotating spawns should not be a requirement, locking down prime spawns should be a reward for bravery and feel very good to control. Timers are WAY too long for selentine tier and higher monsters. Nobody wants to wait 7 to 15 minutes for a respawn with barely any chance at rare items and only a small amount of high-end materials. Protecting the economy is key but fun factor is the most important element of farming and it's often just not fun to burn time waiting for long respawns. Keep the same core loot and greatly boost chances for rare loot, then cut down respawn timers.

I actually love spawn rotation, I wish the portal system was designed better to link up more spawns. The spawn scaling system is all over the place and completely ignores the challenge rating of the spawns, use to overwhelming for me on some, now its just broken.

New uncommon and rare items need to be added to hard monster loot tables. Map fragments is a great start, keep it going.

* Artifact Fragments for Relics
* Mount Armor
* Magic Weapons that have spell effects when held like Fire Shield
* Fireworks
* Spell Scrolls (Magic spells that only work once like "Uber Launch" or Pink Firebolt)

The ice dragon and kraken loot tables being poor for such a long time is just sad, why do they not get buffed? These are some of the biggest monsters in the game, come on!

The Ice dragon seem ok, its only been killed maybe 4 or 5 times now, but the Kraken spawn under it kind of ruins the Dragon. The Kraken loot got reduced by 2/3 from the last patch because of the stupid ass map fragments, it also stopped my old clan leader from wanting to play again so cheers for that.

I really like the new monsters! However, they do not drop rare items often enough. It is common to kill 30 or more without a rare item, that can mean as much as 9 hours of farming! What's worse is that the selentine and veilron tier monsters seem to only have a chance at a neithal key and maps are extremely rare, if they even drop at all. I have killed a ton of them and gotten very little.

The "new" monsters are just re-skins and are about as exciting as finding dogdoo on the bottom of your shoe in a park. Its also super annoying that the Gora had its Rare ore removed, but you still have dungeon quests that give more rare ore then killing golems. While I I'm on the topic of quests why was the Meat Quest nerfed? This was one of the tinny joys of the game to know a profitable quest.
If anything more repeatable quests like this should be created with rewards like 500 Eggs for cooking 500 fish.

It should be possible for multiple rare items to drop from the same kill. I MUCH prefer the chance of a random explosion of loot like in dfo over the extremely stingy rare item yield of RoA. For example, in dfo you could kill an evil eye and get a leenspar key, a medium map, a large map, and a runestone. It was a really lucky drop and felt GOOD. In Roa this is not possible, you get a max of one rare item and that would be an extreme long shot chance at a large map. High levels of excitement from loot are just not a big part of the game for almost all monsters.

I hated this loot drop in DFO because it made every single kill feel like I was getting cheated out of an amazing drop. But now I feel cheated after seeing a Map fragment and knowing that treasure maps are completly broken until they fix the bug with the one map at the center map that is glitched out

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Honestly BPG need to make a system that lets you comment on Mob spawn location in game and rate them with a thumbs up or down if they want to get an honest opinion of whats really going on. They should also track how much time players spend at each spawn location. Because I've found mobs that drop no gold but over 1000 gold in materials and die in 4 hits. To me this is an economics problem at its core, but it has and will be treated like a loot problem which only increases the problem in the long run.

Wealthy

Can you clowns take it to the nearest playground, or PMs? Nobody kinda gives a fuck here, thanks.
3 x Mousewheel scrolls down the drain. These things have a lifespan you know!

@GoodDoggie
Character progression did contribute a lot to player activity, but it wasn't any more meaningful.
Progression is usually segregation in MMO's and the REAL game doesn't begin until you hit end game and become viable. Often at times, you end up playing through the early stages for nothing other than a time sink, before you can take part in the fun stuff.
So I'd argue that in Darkfalls case, the activity should take place after the warmup/progression phase, i.e. Territory control, siege/conquest warfare, and any/all conflict revolving around those areas.

And in relation, I think the PVE should be useful to fuel what's needed for that (as it mostly is already)

@GoodDoggie
Character progression did contribute a lot to player activity, but it wasn't any more meaningful.Progression is usually segregation in MMO's and the REAL game doesn't begin until you hit end game and become viable. Often at times, you end up playing through the early stages for nothing other than a time sink,before you can take part in the fun stuff.So I'd argue that in Darkfalls case, the activity should take place after the warmup/progression phase, i.e. Territory control, siege/conquest warfare, and any/all conflict revolving around those areas.

And in relation, I think the PVE should be useful to fuel what's needed for that (as it mostly is already)

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What do you mean by this? If anything can motivate people to log in, gear up, and go out it seems fairly meaningful to me.

Usually MMOs have near endless progression, and anything amounting to an end game, a state where there is nothing left to work towards, is not intended to be reached.
You hear ideas like this thrown around alot especially when talking about a game like WoW, where it can certainly feel like the game doesnt really start until you hit lvl cap, but this is simply because progression is extremely fast up until the lvl cap, which makes it feel less rewarding. Getting a piece of armour which will become obsolete in a few lvls, obviously doesnt feel as rewarding as getting a piece of armour you arent likely to replace until you move to the next raid tier which could be months away, even if you dont take into account the fact that a big part of what makes progression feel good is the comparison to your peers, being the first person in your friend group, or in your clan, or on the server to acquire an epic weapon feels great, but acquiring the same epic weapon when everyone else already has legendaries wont.

The progression, and gameplay dont really change when you approach the level cap, but it starts feeling more rewarding because it slows down and because it yields more status.

And what comes to viability its not like its a switch being turned when you hit lvl cap, just as when you were lvling you slowly become viable for more and more content as your power increases, after lvl cap you can't jump straight into raids, you must first work on your armour.

Clicking buttons is not inherently fun, its the rewards which make it fun, be it bragging rights or wealth or character progression.If one has progressed to a point where there are no more rewards to acquire, one may find "fun stuff" isnt very fun at all; Hence why attending a raid you need something from is fun and exciting, but doing a raid which you need nothing from feels like a chore, but hey atleast youre getting dkp.

Conquest and clan content can be something to do for the whole clan, but I think youll find people enjoy working on personal goals much more than collective ones. Everyone is down to go kill a devil so they can get macro cash for the night, everyone is too busy to go zerg it down for clan funds.

LoyalLegend

What do you mean by this? If anything can motivate people to log in, gear up, and go out it seems fairly meaningful to me.

Usually MMOs have near endless progression, and anything amounting to an end game, a state where there is nothing left to work towards, is not intended to be reached.
You hear ideas like this thrown around alot especially when talking about a game like WoW, where it can certainly feel like the game doesnt really start until you hit lvl cap, but this is simply because progression is extremely fast up until the lvl cap, which makes it feel less rewarding. Getting a piece of armour which will become obsolete in a few lvls, obviously doesnt feel as rewarding as getting a piece of armour you arent likely to replace until you move to the next raid tier which could be months away, even if you dont take into account the fact that a big part of what makes progression feel good is the comparison to your peers, being the first person in your friend group, or in your clan, or on the server to acquire an epic weapon feels great, but acquiring the same epic weapon when everyone else already has legendaries wont.

The progression, and gameplay dont really change when you approach the level cap, but it starts feeling more rewarding because it slows down and because it yields more status.

And what comes to viability its not like its a switch being turned when you hit lvl cap, just as when you were lvling you slowly become viable for more and more content as your power increases, after lvl cap you can't jump straight into raids, you must first work on your armour.

Clicking buttons is not inherently fun, its the rewards which make it fun, be it bragging rights or wealth or character progression.If one has progressed to a point where there are no more rewards to acquire, one may find "fun stuff" isnt very fun at all; Hence why attending a raid you need something from is fun and exciting, but doing a raid which you need nothing from feels like a chore, but hey atleast youre getting dkp.

Conquest and clan content can be something to do for the whole clan, but I think youll find people enjoy working on personal goals much more than collective ones. Everyone is down to go kill a devil so they can get macro cash for the night, everyone is too busy to go zerg it down for clan funds.

My thoughts, now in vibrant colours!

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Still working on what color you are looking to dodge with? I reccomend blue.

Hero

Overall, I love farming in RoA but there are some very serious issues that need to be addressed and discussed. I really want to see what you guys think, let's see if we can promote some positive change because I know a lot of you hate farming and those of us that enjoy it often have criticisms as well.

Rare loot is far too rare to the point of it not being fun. I keep track of everything I farm and have hundreds of screenshots from hour-long farming sessions, nearly all pictures have roughly the same loot for each monster. Loot is extremely predictable. Maps should be MUCH more common, as should keys.

Big monsters are less profitable than small and medium monsters in most cases. Sure, the loot is generally good but the respawn timers are huge. If you actually calculate gold per hour these monsters are often very poor options for wealth building. This does not include champions and other boss monsters.

Rotating spawns should not be a requirement, locking down prime spawns should be a reward for bravery and feel very good to control. Timers are WAY too long for selentine tier and higher monsters. Nobody wants to wait 7 to 15 minutes for a respawn with barely any chance at rare items and only a small amount of high-end materials. Protecting the economy is key but fun factor is the most important element of farming and it's often just not fun to burn time waiting for long respawns. Keep the same core loot and greatly boost chances for rare loot, then cut down respawn timers.

New uncommon and rare items need to be added to hard monster loot tables. Map fragments is a great start, keep it going.

The ice dragon and kraken loot tables being poor for such a long time is just sad, why do they not get buffed? These are some of the biggest monsters in the game, come on!

I really like the new monsters! However, they do not drop rare items often enough. It is common to kill 30 or more without a rare item, that can mean as much as 9 hours of farming! What's worse is that the selentine and veilron tier monsters seem to only have a chance at a neithal key and maps are extremely rare, if they even drop at all. I have killed a ton of them and gotten very little.

It should be possible for multiple rare items to drop from the same kill. I MUCH prefer the chance of a random explosion of loot like in dfo over the extremely stingy rare item yield of RoA. For example, in dfo you could kill an evil eye and get a leenspar key, a medium map, a large map, and a runestone. It was a really lucky drop and felt GOOD. In Roa this is not possible, you get a max of one rare item and that would be an extreme long shot chance at a large map. High levels of excitement from loot are just not a big part of the game for almost all monsters.

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I totaly agree with you. Farming should be a fun thing to do and not a pain in the ass/meh thing to do.
Right now it feels like i rather play df simulator than go farming.
Plz fix the farming.

Wealthy

Nothing more useless than running to a mob spawn to farm, only to find its not spawning at all because someone else is farming the other one 20 minutes away.
Fuck you for wanting to pve right now.
What is achieved by that system? And why is it so important?

Imo it was weak attempt at economy control of rares, which would be totaly redundant in the end.

About Rise of Agon

Rise of Agon is a fantasy MMORPG combining competitive first person combat with a dynamic sandbox environment. Battle with thousands of players in full-loot, open world PvP and put your skills to the test in epic sieges and naval battles.